Within the last year, the 4B movement has gained a large following in the United States, now boasting full social media accounts dedicated to the social movement and the hashtag #4bforever. Yet despite this, widespread understanding of 4B as a feminist movement, and broader conceptualization of it within the history of feminism, lags behind.
The movement originally began in South Korea around 2019. It has roots in both a previous Korean feminist movement, called “Escape the Corset,” as well as a highly influential and globally best-selling South Korean novel, Kim Jiyoung: Born 1982, written by Cho Nam-Joo. The novel, which chronicles major life stages of a Korean woman in her interactions with men and society at large, was inspired by Nam-Joo’s real-life experiences and has been credited with starting the 4B movement itself. The name “4B” is shorthand for four Korean words that define its core commitments that all begin with the Korean “bi,” or “no” in English. They are: “bisekseu” (no having sex with men); “biyeonae” (no dating men); “bihon” (no marrying men); and “bichulsan” (no having children with men).
Although these core principles of women refusing to interact with men in these ways may seem extreme, I think it is important to situate the movement within a wider social context, and within the trajectory of feminist movements themselves. Doing so helps to make sense of why so many women find the notion of a life free from men so appealing, and, perhaps, even rational. To understand this, we should start to consider what women’s lives with men—as their sexual partners, romantic partners, and co-parents—are actually like. Fortunately, there are a plethora of studies on these exact interactions; unfortunately, they spell out quite a dismal picture.
Although this picture of the fairness of unpaid labor within heterosexual relationships is concerning, it is even worse than it appears when we consider two additional contextual factors. First, the kind of unpaid labor done matters: for while men are expected to perform some domestic labor, the kind that they typically perform (e.g., yard work) is both significantly more sporadic, enjoyable, and less critical and stressful than the kind of unpaid labor women are expected to perform (e.g., cleaning, cooking, and childcare). Second, even when men perform unpaid labor, they often use weaponized incompetence, with 30% of men in one study admitting to purposely doing domestic tasks poorly so that they will no longer be asked to do them; we can only guess how many more men either wouldn’t admit to doing so, or aren’t consciously aware of doing so. So, even if men perform minimal, sporadic domestic labor, they tend to do so badly and do not continue to perform that labor in the future. Similar statistics are found with respect to other forms of unpaid labor, like emotional and sexual labor. Here, studies have found that, for example, women perform more emotional labor than men in their relationships and that up to 80% of women fake orgasms, with 92% of women doing so to protect the ego of their sexual partner.
Now, one line of response is the following: these disparities in labor, and the general amount of unpaid labor women perform while in relationships with men, don’t themselves provide a good reason for women to opt out of personal relationships with men. It could, one might think, be a high input/high output situation: yes, women perform significant labor, and significantly more than men, but they get a lot out of their relationships with men, perhaps even benefiting from them more than men do, and receiving more overall benefits than they do living a life being single. Unfortunately, recent research by Paul Dolan, Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics, has found just the opposite: namely, that women who are married to men are less happy and less healthy than single women. In fact, his research found that single women who have never married and never had children are the happiest, healthiest demographic of women. At the same time, though, men who are married to women are far happier and live healthier, longer lives than men who are single. Dolan’s research here echoes facts about particular aspects of women’s well-being within relationships, such as their sexual well-being; it has been found that heterosexual women experience the fewest orgasms, and up to 75% of women experience pain during intercourse at some point in their lives. Overall, the research shakes out to show that the demographics that are most happy and healthy are single women and married men, and those that are the least happy are single men and married women. So, it looks rather like women are performing significantly more labor than men in heterosexual relationships yet benefiting less than men do from those relationships—even less, in fact, than if they were single.
These two facts—women’s performing significantly more labor in relationships with men and yet benefiting less than men do in the relationship—allow us to see the 4B movement as, fundamentally, a labor strike. In other words, the 4B movement has women withhold their unpaid labor from men due to their exploitation by men when they stand in personal relationships with them. To see this, we need to notice a few things. First, the 4B movement follows the same general structure of labor strikes: those being exploited through their labor production due to unfair working conditions withhold it from those who benefit from their labor. In this case, women are the laborers, their exploited labor is the various forms of unpaid labor, those who benefit from it are the men that they have personal relationships with, and the unfair working conditions are the ways in which they fail to be adequately compensated (e.g., in terms of their well-being) from performing such labor in relationships with men.
Second, labor plays a central role in the 4B movement due to its being both enabled by and a critical reaction against the prominent recent Girl Boss feminist movement. Many identify its peak with Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, which advises women to simply work harder to achieve the same career success as men. “Girl Boss” feminism refers to the popular feminist movement of the early twenty-first century that held that women could and should strive to “have it all,” i.e. to both prioritize and be ambitious in their careers, as well as have traditional cis-hetero-biological families. Girl Boss feminism can be seen as the modern development of second-wave liberal feminism’s push to have (middle- and upper-class, white) women have access to the paid workforce. At the time of second-wave feminism’s iteration of the patriarchal order, women being denied access to paid labor was crucial for coercing women to enter into personal relationships with men, as this was their only form of survival. In other words, women couldn’t, at the time, strike by withholding their unpaid labor. This is because in order for strikes to be possible, it has to be possible for laborers to survive without selling their labor, at least for a period of time. One of the things Girl Boss feminism did, though, was create the conditions to make such a strike possible. In directing women to be ambitious in their careers and education, Girl Boss feminism was carrying on second-wave feminism’s core aim of making women self-sufficient so as to eliminate coercive marriage and create gender equity. And, in one way, it did achieve this goal. Statistics show that women now graduate with four-year degrees at higher rates than men and own more homes than men. Women don’t need men to survive or even to have comfortable lives anymore, and without this, 4B would not be possible.
Yet, at the same time, Girl Boss feminism failed to achieve gender equity for women, especially from an intersectional lens. This is largely due to its failure to engage critically with capitalism itself, assuming that more labor, and more money, is good and unconditionally good for women; it focused its attention on changing women as individual laborers in the paid labor market rather than changing the structure of capitalist labor itself and how it genders labor. In this way, while women made gains in their paid employment and financial futures, they failed to make gains in other aspects of labor that are necessary for achieving true equity. As a result, their exploitation continued, and in some ways, their well-being was made even worse. Perhaps the biggest failure of Girl Boss feminism was its notion that women could and should want to “have it all”: have both the paid career and the cis-hetero-biological family life. While many participants in Girl Boss feminism envisioned that their paid labor contributions would increase in stride with their male partners’ unpaid labor contributions, this failed to be the case. While women have become skilled paid laborers on parity with men, men continue to lack the skills and willingness to perform the myriad of unpaid labor that needs to be done. Instead, this gave rise to what is now known as the second shift: the majority of women work paid labor positions and then go home to work their second job of unpaid labor. In this way, second-wave and Girl Boss feminism left women performing even more labor due to their refusal to critically question the value of unpaid labor, paid labor, and, perhaps most crucially, the value of traditional heterosexual relationships for women.
The 4B movement, however, does critically question labor and its place in women’s lives in this way. It shows that women are recognizing and valuing their labor more, specifically their unpaid labor. They have come to recognize that they are being compensated far too little for the value of their labor, and have decided to refuse to enable their own exploitation.
At the same time, one might wonder whether this is really the best solution to the problems here. Do we really want women to refuse to engage with men in all of these ways? Isn’t this against the core values of inclusivity and acceptance? Wouldn’t the more rational thing for women to do be to stay in relationships with men but simply try to have more equitable relationships with them?
To answer quite simply: no. To see this, we should note that the 4B movement is not the first type of feminist movement that argues that women ought to isolate themselves from men. Known as separatist movements, these feminist movements of the 1970s argued that escaping the oppression of men and promoting the well-being of women could only be achieved by women living completely independently of and literally away from men. One core rationale for these movements was the many ways in which men are simply flat-out dangerous to women and their literal lives. This problem of male violence against women has unfortunately not improved, and today still serves as the other major catalyst for the 4B movement itself. In fact, Korea’s rate of intimate-partner violence is significantly higher than the global average of 30%, standing at 41.5%. And even setting aside the risk of violence, feminist theorists like Jane Ward have noted the disconcerting phenomenon that heterosexual men seem to, by and large, hate women, even and especially the women they desire to have sex with, date, and marry. However, unlike these separatist movements of the past—which centered around the intersection of gender and sexuality, as lesbianism was a core constitutive component—the 4B movement consists largely of straight women. Adherents of the movement admit that while they may be sexually attracted to men and not women, they are nevertheless committed to separating from men in their personal lives.
So, if the goal is to have it be rational for straight women to be in relationships with men (given their sexual and romantic attraction to them), what is the best way to achieve this? As with labor strikes in general, one option is to engage in various strike-breaking tactics, often in the form of some kind of coercion, so that continuing with the strike is actually worse or a greater threat to one’s well-being than returning to the labor force. With respect to straight women’s refusal to have personal relationships with men, this has looked like the repeal of women’s right to safe abortions in the United States and recent pushes to repeal no-fault divorce.
Another, obviously better, way to break strikes is to better the labor conditions of the strikers and overall give them what they demand in the name of justice and fairness. In the case of the 4B movement, this could look like one of two things. Feminist scholars of the twentieth century, like Sylvia Federici in her quintessential piece “Wages Against Housework,” vehemently argued that women should receive payments for their unpaid labor. This idea has even seen a recent resurgence in contemporary non-academic feminist thought. Importantly, though, the payments would need to match the value and importance of women’s unpaid labor, which continues to be largely rendered invisible and effortless (i.e. “natural”), and thus not even recognized as labor. Moreover, while women receiving payment for their unpaid labor would be a vast improvement over their current, complete lack of compensation, this does not address the problem of male violence, which was the other core catalyst of the 4B movement.
This brings us to the other option: men need to be better. More specifically, men need to start contributing more to their relationships with women so that they aren’t exploitative. Just as women worked to become skilled paid laborers, men need to work to become skilled unpaid laborers. And men need to perform this high-quality unpaid labor without adding even more tasks for women to perform (i.e., making them their managers by requiring them to perform the unpaid mental labor of giving them a list of tasks to complete and instructions of how to do them). This is in addition to the work men need to do in unpacking and disavowing their internalized misogyny, i.e. to stop hating and abusing women.
In the end, if we think the 4B movement is not ideal and want it to stop, we need to make it rational for women to be in interpersonal relationships with men. To do this, heterosexual relationships need to be something that improves women’s lives rather than detracting from them. Until men start contributing to women’s lives in these positive ways, women will continue to act rationally and separate from men, refusing to be exploited.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Nicole Dular
Nicole Dular is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy atNotre Dame of Maryland University. She works on issues at the intersection of ethics, epistemology, and feminist philosophy. Her work has been published in Philosophical Studies, Hypatia, and Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, among other peer reviewed journals. You can find more about her research and teaching at nicoledular.weebly.com.
